Google Business Listing Optimization Guide

google business listings

Local businesses that have a well-optimized Google Business listing often dominate local search results compared to their less optimized competitors. Having a well-optimized Google Business listing is an easy way to bring in tons of views, website visits, phone calls, and leads. 

I’ll show you how the basics of how to optimize your Google Business listing based on Google’s guide on improving your local rankings. Google’s guide is short but it shares everything you need to know about improving your local rankings. In this post, I’m going to expand on Google’s guide a bit.

 

Google’s Local SEO Ranking Factors

In order to rank for local searches, you first need to know what the main ranking factors are for local SEO. Here are the most important local ranking factors that are mentioned by Google. These factors are:

  1. Search relevance: How relevant your business is to a user’s search.
  2. Proximity: How close your business is to the searcher.
  3. Prominence: How well-known your business is by people in your area.
  4. Website Authority: How established your website is compared to other websites.

In this guide, I’ll cover how to leverage these 4 ranking factors throughout your Google business listing and website.

 

1. Add complete and detailed listing information

Google’s first recommendation is to ensure that your listing is filled out thoroughly and accurately. This is pretty straightforward but often overlooked. Improving your listing information is the best way to improve your search results. Here are some tips on how to maximize your results:

Enter complete data

  • Add every bit of information you can that is either relevant or useful. 
  • Your business’s categories should have the best fitting category as your primary, and other applicable categories as secondary categories. 
  • Add a detailed description of your business.
  • Add your products and services to your listing and add descriptions to those as well.

Verify your location

  • Make sure your location is verified by Google, your listing won’t show until you do!
  • You can verify by postcard and sometimes by phone.

Keep hours accurate

  • Use your actual business hours, users can update this if they aren’t accurate.
  • Make sure you update your hours for holidays and special events too.

Manage and respond to reviews

  • Provide real, thoughtful feedback on both good reviews and bad reviews.
  • Ask happy customers for Google reviews, it’s a ranking factor!

Add Photos

  • Add photos of your business, your team, the office, lounges, projects, and anything that showcases you are a real business.
  • Adding a couple of new photos every month can also help you increase visibility.

 

2. Improve Your Relevance to Searches

Once you have your listing filled out with detailed information, the next step is to make it as relevant to searches as possible. To do this, all you need to do is figure out what keywords people search for when looking for your products and services. Once you know what keywords are going to be highly relevant, all you need to do is sprinkle those keywords into your listing. 

Do some keyword research

Google wants you to add detailed information to your listing so their algorithm can figure out what search terms to show your listing for. If you know what search terms you want your listing to show for, you can add those as keywords in your listing and improve your search results. You can figure out what keywords you should add to your listing by doing some keyword research. There are lots of tools that can help you with keyword research, pick your favorite and get to researching!

Optimize your listing with keywords you want to rank for

Once you know what keywords you would like your business to show up for, all you need to do is strategically add them to your listing. You can add these keywords in your description, categories, products, services, and posts. Something I mention often is that it’s always better to use natural language than to stuff your content with keywords. Well-written content should always take precedence over well-optimized content. If you have well-written content that can touch on your keywords and be on-topic, you are good to go.

 

3. Optimize your Google Business listing for local searches

There are two types of searches that Google considers local. The first type is when the search includes the city or area you are in such as “digital marketing agency in Edmonton”. The second type is when the search doesn’t include the location in the search term. When the user doesn’t include a location in their search, Google will leverage the users’ location data to show customized local search results.

Knowing how to optimize for local searches will help you maximize your visibility in your city, which means more calls and leads for your business! Here are some tips:

  • Include your city in your listing description.
  • Include your city on your website’s page titles.
  • Mention your city on your website’s landing page headlines and content.
  • Use local business schema on your website.
  • Get citations from websites that include your business name, address, and phone number (more on this below.)

 

4. Improving Your Prominence

What is prominence? In Google’s eyes, your prominence is how well-known your business is. This is one of the most important ranking factors for local SEO and it works similarly to your website’s authority. If a user searches for a local product or service and Google shows three listings that all had the exact same information, prominence will decide who gets to rank #1 for that search. 

Google included prominence in their algorithms to help well-known businesses and landmarks in the area show up more prominently than others. However, Google doesn’t actually know how well-known a business is, it only has an idea based on a collection of signals. This means that if you can influence the signals Google uses to determine prominence, you can increase your local rankings.

Here’s how to improve your prominence:

1. Get directory citations

A directory is a website like Yellow Pages that lists your business. The information listed often contains your business name, address, and phone number. These are called citations (mentioned earlier). There are thousands of directories you can list your business on, often for free. Getting more citations will help you improve your prominence. You’ll want to get citations from big directory sites like Yellow Pages and Apple Maps, as well as local citations like your Chamber of Commerce and citations on industry-specific directory websites relevant to your business.

How many citations do you need? It depends on how many citations your competitors have. There is definitely a law of diminishing returns with citation building. A good rule of thumb is around 80 for each location.

2. Get more reviews and higher ratings

The number of reviews you have and your average rating score are factored into local search rankings. Getting more reviews and more positive ratings will improve your business’s local ranking. This means that striving to get great Google reviews from your customers will actually help you get more customers. There are some great tools out there that can help you get more reviews, like this Google review link generator.

3. Maintain consistent and updated information

A huge factor that is often not mentioned enough is having consistent information across the web. If you have listings on a directory with information that is no longer accurate, it is no longer helping you. Make sure your name, address, phone number, website, and other business information remain constant wherever you list your business online, including your social media profiles.

4. Have verified social media profiles

Having verified social media profiles is another little-known factor for ranking locally. Google knows whether your social media listings are verified, they even filed a patent that detects if your followers are fake. A real business is more likely to have real social media profiles. Google’s algorithms take your social media profile’s validity into consideration when determining your local prominence.

 

5. Improve Your Website’s SEO

SEO best practices on your website also help your local SEO rankings. Your website’s ranking in search results is a ranking factor for your local SEO results. This means that if your website ranks #1 for a search term, you’re much more likely to show up #1 in local maps results for that search in your area. There are three main areas to focus on when improving your website’s SEO:

1. Improve your website content

Optimizing your website’s content for searches that are highly relevant to your business will help you improve your rankings and visibility. If you optimize your content, you will get more traffic from people searching for your products and services, which will help you get more leads and customers. Optimizing your content involves some keyword research, planning, and strategic edits to your website’s content. You should also remove any duplicate content on your site, it will help Google find the right pages to show.

2. Work on your technical SEO

There are certain technical aspects of your website that Google takes into consideration when determining rankings. Improving your website’s technical SEO will help you improve your rankings. Your website’s loading speed, URL structure, indexing settings, and links within your website all contribute to your overall rankings because they help Google understand your website. Improving the technical aspects of your website can be difficult and usually requires an expert’s guidance.

3. Acquire more backlinks

The quality and quantity of websites that link to yours have been a major ranking factor since SEO began. If you can get great and relevant websites to link to your website, you will see major improvements in your rankings. You can get more links by making great content that people will link to, like a guide, tool or infographic. You can also get more links by getting published on websites in your city like the local news or chamber of commerce. There are tons of ways to build links, check out this definitive guide to link building to learn all about getting more links.

 

6. Tracking Your Google Business Insights

Once you’ve optimized your business for local SEO, you are probably going to want to track your results. Google Business insights provide lots of useful information about how people find and interact with your listing. However, Google’s insights only provide three months of data. Personally, I like the SuperMetrics for data studio integration for reporting on historical Google Business performance.

 

Wrapping up

Improving your local search rankings is one of the best ways to get more highly relevant traffic which will help your business get more customers. SEO can be confusing and technical, but the benefits of having a well-optimized site and Google Business listing are definitely worth the trouble. For some more tips on optimizing your listing, check out this guide.

4 Quick Wins To Improve Local Rankings

local search metrics

Looking for some easy ways to gain a competitive advantage on your Google Business Listing to improve your local rankings?

Here are a few that I’ve used for years, they work great!

 

1. Use your main keyword in your business name

We don’t want to stuff our business name with keywords, Google policy actually requests you use the exact same name that you use elsewhere, but that doesn’t stop SEOs. With some creativity, you can use your target keyword in your business name with ease.

Here’s an example:

keyword in business name

The business name is Chief Renovations, and the business listing is “Kitchen Cabinets Calgary by Chief”. This company ranks pretty well locally for competitive keywords despite having only 8 reviews and a small online presence. Their domain is also kitchencabinetscalgary, which is an exact match domain. Another trick that helps boost your local rankings.

 

2. Ask customers to mention the specific product/service they purchased in reviews

Google reviews are great, get as many as you can. However, you should be asking your customers to talk about the products and services they purchased from you. Google looks at the keywords within reviews and even bolds them. Google has confirmed that reviews are a local ranking factor. Take a look at your reviews on your Google Business listing as well as your competitors to get an idea of what Google finds is relevant to searchers.

Keywords in Google reviews

 

3. Use keywords in your Google Business services

Services are an often overlooked area for local businesses. Google will look at the services you offer within your Google business listings to help determine rankings. But only specific services will show in specific search results. So it’s important to know how you should be wording your services.

Here’s an example:

keywords in services

The blue checkmarks are coming from Google Business listings that have created a service with those exact names. So if you were in Chicago and wanted to rank for hot water heater repair, you should put “Water heater repair & replacement” as a service, as well as “Water heater repair”.

In order to find these keywords, you should use a local search tool like isearchfrom.com to set your location and ensure you don’t see personalized search results. Then type in your target keyword and look at the local three-pack / map pack/ snack pack to see which services are being used to rank for this search. Also, I noticed that the #1 result is using a keyword in their business name.

 

4. Use your target keyword on your website

This may seem obvious, but If you want to rank for a specific keyword you should mention it in an exact match format on your website. Either on your home page, service page, or location page. You would be surprised how many companies want to rank for certain searches and they don’t even have matching content on their site to support that search.

Here’s an example:

keyword on website

The #1 search result for the search “breach of contract lawyer Chicago” has a snippet that says “their website mentions breaches of contract”. And sure enough, they have a breach of contract page on their website. Try this with other searches you’re trying to rank locally for. You probably have your main keywords covered, but what about your secondary keywords?

 

Recap

To improve your local rankings quickly:

  • Change your business name to include your target keyword
  • Ask customers to talk about the products and services they purchased from you in reviews
  • Fill out your services within your Google Business listing
  • Mention your target and secondary keywords somewhere on your website

How To Optimize Local Business Service Pages For Top Rankings

how to optimize service pages for a local business

In this post you’ll learn how to:

  • Plan out what service pages your site should have
  • Make your pages convert better
  • Optimize your service pages for local search
  • Find the best keywords to use
  • Get high-quality backlinks
  • Fully optimize your pages with technical SEO
  • And more!

 

Most service-based businesses have service pages on their website but a lot of people don’t know how to properly optimize these pages to get top local rankings. I’ve been doing SEO for local businesses for more than 9 years. In this post, I’m going to cover all the best things I’ve learned about optimizing service pages for SEO.

 

Why optimizing your service pages for SEO is important

Service pages play an important role in your website’s SEO because they will help you attract local search traffic that is already in the market for the services you sell.

  • Optimized service pages can generate lots of traffic and leads
  • Optimized service pages get top organic rankings
  • Service pages influence your local map pack rankings
  • Service pages can pre-sell people on the services you offer, making it easier to turn them into customers
  • 47% of website visitors will look at service pages first

 

Jump To

Click the links below to jump to a specific section of this page.

  1. Make a page for every service
  2. Design for conversions
  3. Explain the feature & benefits of working with you
  4. Optimize for local searches
  5. Plan your target keywords & keyword usage
  6. Optimize title, description & page title (H1)
  7. Structure your content topics & go in-depth
  8. Add relevant images & optimize them
  9. Optimize your page load speed & pass Core Web Vitals
  10. Add internal links
  11. Acquire local backlinks
  12. Add service schema

 

1. Make A Page For Every Service

Every service needs a page regardless of your site structure. You need a page that covers the details of each service you offer. From my experience, people and search engines will often think your business simply does not offer a service if it isn’t mentioned on your website. Ensure each page has an easy-to-read URL like “website.com/services/service-page/”.

Services you offer will show on Google map packs

If you rank for a service locally in Google’s map pack, you’ll enjoy over 100% more traffic than competitors who don’t. Your service pages not only influence your local map pack rankings, but they can literally show on map pack results

example of how Google will show map pack results based on website content

In this example, you can see the map pack result says “their website mentions water heater and repair“. Service pages improve your map pack rankings.

Your home page is a great opportunity to rank for your main service

Most local service businesses have the main service they offer and then use service pages to cover additional services they offer that are related to their main service. Your home page can be your main service page. For example, if you’re a foundation repair company, you’ll want to optimize your home page for foundation repair services. If you’re the type of business that can use their home page for their main service, you won’t need to also have a service page for that service as the home page will be dedicated to ranking for your main service.

Using your home page for your main service will also work much better than using a service page because your home page is the most powerful page on your website. Your home page has the best shot at ranking for highly competitive search terms.

 

2. Design For Conversions

Before we dive into SEO, I want to cover the importance of designing these pages with the goal of converting visitors into leads. Service pages are your best sales tools. You don’t want your website to be a fancy brochure that doesn’t generate business, so let’s cover what you need to do to ensure these pages get excellent conversion rates.

Match user intent to get more leads

Most of the time your visitors have a problem or pain point they are trying to solve.

Your service page should be the answer to their problems and inspire them to take action and contact you. Your visitors should be thinking things like “this is exactly what I’m looking for!” and “these guys look like they can help me solve my problem!”

It can be difficult to get that kind of reaction from users if your page isn’t optimized for conversions.

Here are things you should include in your service pages to help improve your conversion rates:

  • Contact form and contact info above the fold – don’t make people do the work of going to your contact page
  • Explain the next steps – encourage your users to reach out with a call to action, and explain what will happen after they reach out
  • Describe their current situation and what their situation will look like after working with you
  • Answer common objections – talk to your team about the common objections they get for your services and handle these objections right on your page
  • Check your page on different devices and browsers to ensure there are no UX issues or broken elements
  • Include reviews of happy customers, case studies, or before & after examples

 

3. Explain The Features And Benefits Of Working With You

It’s crucial to explain why people should work with you and not your competitor.

Your service pages should explain what you have to offer that is unique or a competitive advantage. Most businesses will just talk about how they offer a service, that they have been in business for a while and that they offer competitive pricing and great customer service. That’s boring! What can you offer that gives you an upper hand? Do you have warranties or guarantees? Do you do anything that your competitors don’t? Spend some time brainstorming why people should work with you and not your competitor down the road and put it into words on your website.

It doesn’t even have to be unique. For example, if everyone offers a money-back guarantee but no one mentions it on their service page, it will appear as though you’re the only business offering that.

Include a prominently visible section near the top of your page to highlight why people should work with you. Here’s an example:

Example of a business that highlights their features and benefits

In this image, the business is listing reasons why people choose them, like their 24-hour service, 100% satisfaction guarantee, and a lifetime warranty.

Got Proof?

Can you prove that you’ll actually solve your visitor’s problem? If so, show it off. Reviews, testimonials, and case studies are your best friends for convincing people you can solve their problems. If you don’t have any proof, you can implement a strategy to start collecting proof. You can also reach out to previous customers for case studies, before & afters, videos, reviews, and any other proof you can get.

 

Perhaps your business has multiple physical locations or a service area that stretches beyond your city. If you want to rank in multiple locations, you should first optimize your service pages. Then work on location pages, and then local landing pages. This guide covers service pages. My other guide on multi-location local SEO covers location pages and local landing pages.

Your service pages should be optimized for your main city. If all cities you operate in are equally important, save your local city optimization for location pages and local landing pages.

To optimize your service page for local searches, there are several places where you should mention your target city:

  • Title tags
  • Meta descriptions
  • Page titles (H1)
  • Subheadings (h2s)
  • Within content

You should aim to mention your target city within your content a few times and customize the content for your area. For example, if you do flood damage restoration and you live in a city that floods every year, talk about how your city has a flooding problem and you’re the solution.

 

5. Plan Your Target Keywords And Keyword Usage

Finding the right keywords to include in your content is crucial to improving rankings. It’s also important to use natural language instead of stuffing your pages with keywords. Overusing keywords can hurt rankings, while not using enough can result in no rankings at all. Something I’ve learned with keywords is it’s better to use a variety of similar keywords instead of repeating the same one over and over. To find the best keyword variations, you just need to do some keyword research.

keyword research tools

My favorite tools for keyword research are SEMrush Keyword Magic and Ahrefs keyword explorer. Both are paid tools. I also love Google Keyword Planner because it’s free (if you have an ad account) and it gives you the option to narrow your search results by city, which is great for finding local keywords.

A totally free tool I also use frequently is AnswerThePublic. It is great for finding all the things people search for but doesn’t provide search volume. You can download a list of keywords from AnswerThePublic and upload the list to your favorite keyword research tool to find the average search volume.

An important thing to keep in mind for search volume is that keyword research tools typically only get accurate search volume for commercial searches and can’t anticipate all the variations people will use. If your keyword research tool says a keyword gets 100 searches per month, there are probably many similar keywords that also get plenty of search volume. If you have a page on your website that ranks really well and gets lots of traffic you can look at Google Search Console to see thousands of search variations people will use to find the same page. Each of those search terms are keywords that a keyword research tool would try to find the individual search volume for. So don’t be discouraged if you see low search volume in your keyword research tools, it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Competitor research

Your competitors’ websites are also a great place to look to find great keywords. If you search for your competitor’s domain in Google like this: “site:mycompetitor.com” it will pull up all the pages on your competitor’s website and show you the titles and descriptions they are using. You can also check out their pages and note which keywords they are using. I recommend using a tool like isearchfrom, which will show you un-personalized results in a target location, and then reviewing the top three websites that show up for a search result. Here’s an example:

Step 1: Target keyword in target location via isearchfrom

isearchfrom for competitor research

Step 2: Top 3 map pack and organic results = best competitors to research

researching your top 3 competitors on Google

Step 3: Search site:competitor.com to find all their pages

how to find your competitors top ranking pages

you can also search “site:competitor.com +keyword”

Google will rank these results based on which pages have the highest relevance and authority. So if you do a search of your competitor’s domain +keywords, it will show their highest ranking pages for that term. Add the keywords that you find to a spreadsheet.

Step 4: Review keyword usage and take note of keywords you should use

Once you have a list of keywords to use you can validate the search volume with a keyword research tool. SEMrush and AHrefs both offer excellent competitor research tools. If you have these tools, give them a try!

Group your keywords by topic category

Once you have a big list of keywords, it’s important to group them because it will make it infinitely easier to plan which pages will get which keywords. You don’t want to try and rank two pages for the same keywords. So add an extra column in your keyword research spreadsheet called “category” and group all your similar keywords together. This is often best done manually as the time it takes to find and try keyword grouping solutions takes more time than just doing the work.

categorize your keyword lists

Here’s an example of a keyword research sheet grouped via a category column, sorted by highest to the lowest volume.

 

6. Optimize Your Title, Description, And Page Title (H1)

These elements are the most important parts of your page and you should include your best keywords in them. I like to go for high-volume keywords for service pages. I don’t care if the tool I’m using says the keyword has a lot of competition because doing all the extra things like internal linking, link building, including lots of content, and optimizing your pages usually manages to get these pages to rank even for highly competitive searches.

Your title, meta description and page title (h1) are the places where you want to include your main target keywords. Here’s a neat trick I learned for picking the best keywords to use.

Step 1: Use isearchfrom with your target keyword and target location (for un-personalized mobile search results)

search for your target keyword in a tool like isearchfrom

Step 2: Review keyword usage within search results

This is a great way to see what’s going to work. For service pages, you want to ensure that you see service pages from other businesses in these search results. If you’re getting things like blog posts, tips, techniques, strategies, how-tos, or anything that isn’t a commercial service, your keyword probably isn’t a good fit for your title. If that happens, make a note of that search term as you can use it for a future blog post.

Once you find a good service search term you want to figure out how to word it. For example, you may want to try and use multiple keywords in one title. If all of your top-ranking competitors are just going for one keyword, then the competition is high and you should stick with one keyword. If you see two or more keywords in the top three results you can likely do the same.

check keyword usage within title tags

In this example, the top-ranking search results are using foundation repair and basement waterproofing in their title tags. This is a great indicator that I can also use both keywords. It makes sense for this type of service because foundation repair and waterproofing go hand-in-hand, but this won’t always be the case for every business and service.

Check for the city in search result titles

If you’re seeing a city in search result titles like “Foundation Repair Lafayette”, you’re going to need to include your city name in your title tag if you want to rank well.

Make your title and description stand out

Google will often change your title tags these days, but it’s still valuable to create custom title tags. I like to do an extra step where I try to make my title tag stand out more than the other guys. If you make your title and description stand out you’ll get more clicks and Google’s RankBrain algorithm will improve our rankings as a result. Title tags shouldn’t exceed 60 characters or they will get cut off in search results. Meta descriptions can be up to 158 characters. Try to fit something extra in your title and description if you have room. Here are some ideas:

  • Top rated
  • Expert
  • 100% guarantee
  • Lifetime warranty
  • Free estimates
  • Same-day service

Increase CTR by crafting winning meta descriptions

Meta descriptions also get changed around by Google often but that shouldn’t deter you from writing decent descriptions for service pages. Meta descriptions won’t directly improve rankings but they can influence click-through rates (CTR). Pages that get more clicks are analyzed by RankBrain and given higher rankings. So great descriptions can indirectly influence rankings. Here are some tips for writing great descriptions:

  • Include a call to action like “get a quote” or “call today”
  • use your target keyword and city
  • mention some selling points like features, benefits, guarantees, warranties, years in business, etc
  • keep it short, sweet, and to the point

here's an example of an awesome meta description for a foundation repair company

Here’s an example of a great description. This description mentions both target keywords, the service area, the city, and has a call to action. It also ranks #1.

Make your page title (H1) unique

Your page title doesn’t have to be exactly the same as your SEO title. You can even make your H1 longer and more robust than your SEO title. There is no character limit for H1s but try not to make your H1 so long that it makes your page look funny. Only use one H1 per page.

 

7. Structure Your Content Topics And Go In-Depth

Word count isn’t a ranking factor. However, a recent study by Backlinko found that pages that ranked #1 had an average of 1,447 words. This is because longer pages tend to be way more in-depth and have a lot more useful information compared to small pages. Google Search Quality Raters guidelines also indicated that the highest quality pages that deserve the best rankings demonstrate a significant amount of time, effort, expertise, and talent/skill. The best way to rank #1 is to make a high-quality page that is extremely valuable to users. I recommend going in-depth and making your service pages full of valuable information.

Here’s how to structure your service page content to get top rankings:

Keyword mapping

In the previous steps, I mentioned finding the best keywords through keyword research tools and competitor research as well as grouping your keywords into topics. The next step is to take a group of keywords that are on the topic of one of your services and stitch them into your service page content. To do that I like to divide my keyword list that I have categorized for a page and separate it into three groups. Main content, supplementary content, and relevant posts.

Main content

Use your main, high-volume keywords for your main content. The main content is the meat of your page and has all the valuable information. Your main content should consist of several paragraphs of information about the service you’re offering, features & benefits of choosing you, the process of how your service works, and anything else that’s relevant such as localized information about your city.

Supplementary content

Supplementary content is content that supports your main content. Supplementary content can include things like answers to frequently asked questions, before & afters/case studies, information on specific products or solutions you use, and other information that adds value to your service page.

Relevant posts

Relevant posts can go at the bottom of your service page and should contain blog posts or other resources that are related to your service page. This is the best place to include blog topic ideas you found from your keyword research. If you don’t have posts to share, you can write them in the future and add them to your service page later. Don’t link blog posts on a service page that aren’t relevant. Adding these posts helps people who are still learning and not ready to take action yet. It offers the user an opportunity to stay on your site and build trust in your brand.

 

8. Add Relevant Images And Optimize Them

People like images. Adding relevant images to your page can improve conversion rates. Using a couple of images per page can also keep users on your page longer. Images also increase the likelihood of showing up for visual searches which are growing in popularity every year. Optimized images also make your web pages more accessible.

Here are some tips for selecting and optimizing images to get the best rankings possible:

  • Relevant and unique images are much better than stock photos – use real images of your company or create custom images
  • Use small image sizes and compress your images with an image optimization tool like Smush or Cloudflare
  • Customize the image title and alt text to be descriptive and include keywords where appropriate
  • Try lazy loading your images to improve page load speed
  • Use next-generation image formats like WebP
  • Use quality photos that aren’t blurry

 

9. Optimize Your Page Load Speed And Pass Core Web Vitals Tests

Core web vitals (CWV) are a set of standards made by Google to measure the performance of web pages. CWV is part of Google’s overall page experience protocols, which became a ranking factor in 2020. While CWV is fairly new, page speed isn’t. Making your pages load quickly has been a priority for years. Users are impatient these days and will typically leave your page if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. For every additional second your page takes to load your conversion rates plummet and your bounce rates skyrocket.

Here are some tips to ensure your pages load quickly and pass Core Web Vitals tests:

The tips above are fairly technical so make sure you have a developer or technical SEO expert on hand to help you with them. To see if you’re pages are going to pass Core Web Vitals you can check Page Experience within Google Search Console or enter your URL into Google PageSpeed Insights.

 

Internal links are links on your website that lead to another page on your website. To get top rankings you should ensure that your service pages are some of the most linked-to pages on your website. Internal links help search engines and users find your pages. Search engines look at a couple of factors for internal links. Namely, the importance of the page linking to your page, the number of internal links, anchor text, and relevance. Here are some great places to build internal links to your service pages:

  • Add links to your service pages within your header & footer
  • Link to all your services on your home page
  • Link from location pages to service pages with a “services available at this location” section
  • Build links to service pages via relevant blog posts
  • Mention services/solutions used within case studies/before & afters

 

Links from other websites that link back to you (backlinks) will always be one of the most important ranking factors. When it comes to local SEO, there is an additional benefit to acquiring links from local websites as well as industry-specific websites.

We want to ideally build links directly to each service page instead of our home page. This won’t always be possible, but keep this in mind when you start working on acquiring links.

Google will look at a lot of factors to determine the importance of a link such as relevance, website authority, quality, quantity, anchor text, and referral traffic. I recommend avoiding guest posting on random blogs or any kind of link-building tactic that involves paying people to get links from their sites as this can hurt your rankings or even get your website penalized by Google.

Acquiring Local links

Local links come from local websites. For example, if you’re in Plano Texas, you should strive to get some links from other websites in Plano. How do you do that?

Here are some great strategies for getting local backlinks:

  • Get on local news websites by submitting an interesting topic
  • Join the local chamber of commerce and other local business groups
  • Look for sponsorship and charity opportunities that will link to you from their “our sponsors” page
  • Submit your listing to “Best X businesses in city” type websites
  • Find mentions of your business on the web that don’t link to your website and ask them to link to you
  • Buy your competitors’ domains when they go out of business and forward them to yours (sneaky grey hat tactic)
  • Join various clubs and organizations (that provide links to member’s websites)
  • Contribute to local businesses blogs that aren’t your competitors
  • Add your business to local business directories

Acquiring Industry links

Industry links are slightly easier to get than local links. Industry links are relevant to your industry. Only relevant and high-authority links will make a positive impact on your rankings. If you’re a home renovator, getting links from an interior design site would be relevant. But getting links from a food blog would not be relevant. Acquiring irrelevant links not only provides no value, but it can also even negatively impact your rankings or even get your website penalized for breaking Google’s webmaster guidelines. Getting good industry links often requires you to create and provide content for other websites or create content that is so good people will link to it.

Here are some places to get relevant industry links from:

  • Well-known industry news sites that accept article submissions
  • Bloggers who write about a niche that includes your industry
  • Podcasts in your industry
  • Directories for your industry
  • Industry memberships and organizations

 

12. Add Service Schema

Schema markup is a way to highlight specific information within your page’s code. Schema is not a ranking factor, but Google will look at a page’s schema markup to help determine what a page is about. So in a way schema is an indirect ranking factor. This is the last thing you want to do to your service page. Everything else is more important. If you do everything else on this list, then it’s time for schema!

There are a bunch of different types of schema, but for service pages, we want to use service schema. This is a specific category of schema markup intended to highlight important information about a company that offers a service. To add service schema you will need a developer or SEO who is familiar with schema markup as the process is fairly technical. There are apps and plugins that can make schema a little easier, but they won’t be better than using an actual human who is familiar with schema markup.

Once you find someone to add schema to your website, tell them you want service schema on each of your service pages. Here is the official documentation for service schema. There are a lot of field options for service schema. You only need to add information for the fields you think are relevant. For example, there are fields for ratings, service area, awards, logos, special offers. Once your service schema is added to your site you can copy/paste your page URL into validator.schema.org to verify that your service schema is working properly. If it works, it should look something like this:service schema working

you want to see service listed as one of the schemas detected and there should be 0 warnings and 0 errors. If there are any warnings or errors, the schema isn’t going to work properly.

Pro tip: You can also add local business schema with aggregate rating markup to get stars showing up in search results, this can often skyrocket your CTR and improve your rankings.

 

BTW – You can use whatever naming convention you want for your  service pages and URLs

You don’t have to call your service pages “services”. For example, a dentist may prefer the term “treatments”. Or maybe you like “solutions” better. Using the term services won’t influence your rankings over other terms. If you choose to use different terminology for your services be sure to match your URLs with that term.

If you’re a dentist who wants to use the term “treatments” instead of “services” your URL structure for these pages should look something like this: “dentist.com/treatments/root-canal/”. Or if you’re an energy consultant, you might use a structure like “energyconsultant.com/solutions/cost-reduction/”. You get the idea.

You also don’t even need to have a page for “/services/” that lists all your services. You can take /services/ or whatever term you used right out of your URL structure if you want to keep your URLs short. If you decide to not use general services list pages you should link to all your services on your home page and within your site’s navigation first.

 

Bonus: Tracking Results For Service Page SEO

Once you do the work of improving your service pages you’re going to want to track your results. Here’s some key info on how to do that and what to track to ensure your efforts are paying off.

Google Analytics

Track website visits and leads from your target locations. Track referral traffic and leads from your Google Business listings. Make sure you have goal completions set up to track phone calls, emails, form fills, and anything else that you would define as a lead.

Google Business Insights

Track how many calls you get on your Google Business listings. You can also track how many discovery search impressions you get and how many direct search impressions you get. If “Get Directions” clicks are relevant to your business, you’ll find those in your Google Business insights too. I highly recommend using a tool that connects to Google’s API so you can pull and store historical data. I like to use Google Data Studio with a Supermetrics integration.

Rank tracking tools

You’ll want to track your local rankings to ensure you’re efforts are paying off. You’ll also want to keep an eye on competitors. I like SEMrush’s rank tracking toolAhrefs rank tracking is also fantastic. For local rankings, there are tools like Local Viking that can show you a geo-grid of what position your Google Business listings rank in every corner of your target cities.

 

Wrapping up

This guide covers everything you need to do to create top-ranking lead-generating service pages. You may not be able to implement all of these recommendations, but you should try to do as many as you can. Once you get top-ranking service pages you’ll be able to enjoy acquiring high-quality traffic that converts into ready-to-buy leads.

Here’s a summarized list of everything you should do to optimize your service pages for SEO

  • Make a page for every service
  • Design for conversions
  • Explain the features & benefits of working with you
  • Optimize for local searches
  • Plan your target keywords & keyword usage
  • Optimize your title, description & page title (H1)
  • Structure your content topics & go in-depth
  • Add relevant images and optimize them
  • Optimize your page load speed and pass Core Web Vitals
  • Add internal links
  • Acquire local backlinks
  • Add service schema

How To Rank In Multiple Cities And Locations

Multi-Location SEO Guide

In this post you’ll learn:

  • How to structure your location pages
  • How to optimize your Google Business listings
  • The best interlinking strategy for local landing pages
  • How to get citations and how many you need
  • How to easily boost your EAT
  • When to make city landing pages
  • And more!

 

Does your business have multiple locations or operate in multiple cities? Do you want to get all the leads by outranking all your competitors? Then you’ve come to the right place. In this post, I’ll show you exactly how to structure and optimize your local SEO strategy for multiple locations.

I wrote this guide based on my experience helping a bunch of multi-location brands over the past 9 years. I’ve seen these strategies below work for companies with one location and a service area of several nearby cities, and I’ve also seen these strategies work for companies with 400 locations across the country. I’ve seen countless companies go from hardly ranking to getting hundreds of leads a month with these strategies. So read on!

Here are some stats for you to understand the importance of doing SEO right for multiple locations:

 

Jump In:

skip to a specific section of this page by clicking on the links below.

  1. Have a dedicated and optimized location page for every location
  2. Optimize your Google Business Listings
  3. Add internal links to your location pages
  4. Build citations for every location
  5. Get local links for each location
  6. Have a winning about us page
  7. Create city landing pages for nearby cities and secondary keywords
  8. Decide on social media strategy for multiple locations
  9. Decide on SEO strategy for franchisees/branch managers that create their own website for their city

 

1. Have a dedicated and optimized location page for every location

You should have a dedicated page on your main website for every physical location your business has. You only want to use one of these pages if you have an actual physical location in the same city. If you don’t, you’ll want to do a city landing page instead. I’ll cover city landing pages later on in this guide.

SEO location pages should be highly optimized, which means they should have a significant effort put into each page. These aren’t “set it and forget it” pages. They should look a lot like contact pages, link to specific service pages, and have signals that highlight their importance by adding internal links, citations, and links from other local websites. You can read my full guide on optimizing location pages for SEO here, read on for a summarized version:

Optimizing your location pages

A highly optimized location page should be useful and informative. It should also be set up to target your main keyword topic. For example, if you’re a disability lawyer, instead of the title tag being something like “Edmonton Location”, go for a juicy local keyword like “Edmonton Disability Lawyers”.

You also want to have all of the essential information on there like your address, phone number, hours, a contact form, a map, a paragraph or two about the location, and content to help you rank for your main keyword.

Some key things to include are:

  • City name placed early in title and meta description.
  • City name in H1 (page title).
  • Local business schema w/ ratings.
  • concise URL structure e.g. “website.ca/locations/edmonton/” or “website.ca/locations/ab/edmonton”.
  • 1,500 words of unique content to help rank #1.
  • Services that are available at this location with a paragraph for each service (linking to your service pages).
  • LSI keywords and similar variants e.g. “Lawyers for work injuries in Edmonton”.
  • Accurate information that exactly matches your Google Business listing and citations.

Make it like a hybrid contact page

A good location page looks like a service page had a baby with a contact page. Here’s an example of a great location page:

An example of a great city landing page for SEO

I like this page because it has:

  • Prominent keyword usage in the title
  • A contact form above the fold
  • Benefits of choosing the company

Having prominent contact information and placing your form at the top will help improve conversion rates. The benefits of working with your company should also stand out. Users should be able to get all the information they need on this page. It shouldn’t be a requirement for a user to browse other pages on your website to get answers and information.

Bonus things to add:

  • A review widget that shows verifiable reviews from third parties like Google, Facebook, etc.
  • Images of your location like staff members, your office, people at work. (Don’t forget to add good image titles and alt tags!)
  • Before & after pictures or links to relevant case studies

Link to and mention your services available at that location

List each service you offer in this location and link to your service page for each service. Yes, It’s ok if all of your services are available. List them and link them! Ideally, you can also include a paragraph of unique text for each service too. This way Google and other search engines can easily understand that you’re a local business offering a suite of services in that city.

The page should be targeting your main local keyword. Later on in this guide, I’ll share some information on how to create city landing pages to go after secondary keywords. For example, if you’re a disability lawyer but you also want to rank for medical malpractice law, then you can create a separate city landing page for that.

But how do you decide which keyword should be the main one, and which ones should be secondary, or what if you want to try and rank for both on one page? Here’s how to decide.

Step 1: Pull up a local search tool like Isearchfrom.com, (this way you won’t get personalized search results) and enter your city and main keyword. I’d recommend mobile for the device as most people search for mobile devices for local searches.

Isearchfrom is a search tool that allows you to see unpersonalized results for a specified country, search term, device, and language..

Step 2: Review the search results, are your competitors using your main keyword in their map pack names? (Their Google Business title) Are they using the main keyword as the title for their Organic search results too? If you’re seeing competing search results with pages optimized purely for your main keyword, you likely won’t be able to rank for multiple focus keywords with one page.

Check your local search results to see what comes up

Step 3: Decide whether or not you can get away with multiple target keywords. Note in the image above that the top 3 organic results are only using variations of “Edmonton Disability Lawyers”. This is a good indication that we can’t compete if we try and rank our location page for multiple keywords.

Continuing with the lawyer example, if the competition is high we want to only go for our main keyword in the title, like “Edmonton Disability Lawyer” instead of “Edmonton Disability & Malpractice Lawyer”.  Then we would make another page for the secondary malpractice keyword.

 

2. Optimize your Google Business Listings

Google Business Listings are imperative to local rankings. You need a Google Business listing to be eligible for showing up in map pack results. And these map pack results dominate because they show 93% of the time for local searches. Businesses that rank in the map pack also enjoy 100% more clicks than those that don’t. Studies have also shown that 16% of businesses receive more than 100 calls each month from their Google Business listing. (These are the listings that are optimized!)

In my personal experience, I’ve seen many local service-based businesses that generate more calls from their Google Business listing than their website. Some of the companies I’ve worked with get upwards of 800 calls a month from a single listing. Below is the summarized version of my Google Business listing optimization guide.

There are a lot of factors that Google looks at for determining local rankings. I’ll walk you through the main ones:

Add complete and detailed listing information

  • Make sure your location is verified by Google, your listing won’t show until you do! (56% of businesses haven’t even claimed their Google Business listings).
  • Your business’s categories should have the best fitting one as your primary category, and other applicable categories as secondary categories.
  • Add your products and services to your listings and add descriptions to those as well.
  • Use your actual business hours. Users can update your hours if they aren’t accurate. Make sure you update your hours for holidays and special events too.
  • Manage and respond to reviews. Provide real, thoughtful responses for both good reviews and bad reviews.
  • Ask happy customers for Google reviews, it’s a ranking factor!
  • Add photos of your business, your team, the office, lounges, projects, people at work, and anything that showcases you are a real business.
  • Add posts and COVID-19 updates to your listings.
  • Add your opening date, it shows in maps search results.

Improve Your Relevance to Searches

Google wants you to add detailed information to your listing so their algorithm can figure out what search terms to show your listing for. If you know what search terms you want your listing to show for, you can add those as keywords in your listing and improve your search results. You can figure out what keywords you should add to your listing by doing some keyword research. There are lots of tools that can help you with keyword research. I like the Google Ads Keyword Planner and SEMrush Keyword magic.

Keyword optimization

Once you know what keywords you would like your business to show up for, all you need to do is strategically add them to your listing. You can add these keywords in your description, categories, products, services, and posts. It’s always better to use natural language than to stuff your content with keywords. If you have well-written content that can touch on your keywords and be on-topic, you’re good to go.

More Google Business tips for boosting your local rankings:

  • Include your target city in your Google Business listing description.
  • Include your target city on your location page titles & descriptions.
  • Consider using your target keyword in your Google Business title.
  • Mention your city on your website’s location page headlines (h1s & h2s) and within the content.
  • Link your Google Business listing to your location page instead of your home page (super effective).

Improve Your Prominence

In Google’s eyes, your prominence is how well-known your business is. This is one of the most important ranking factors for local SEO and it works similar to your website’s authority. Google included prominence in their algorithms to help well-known businesses and landmarks in the area show up more prominently than others. Google collects prominence signals and uses algorithms to decide what results to show. If you influence these prominence signals, you can increase your local rankings.

Here’s how to improve your local prominence:

Directory Citations

A directory is a website like Yellow Pages that lists your business. The information listed contains your business name, address, phone number, and often a few other details. These are called citations. There are thousands of directories you can list your business on, usually for free. Getting more citations will help you improve your prominence. Some SEOs will say that citation building is no longer useful for Local SEO, but I disagree. Getting citations is still considered a foundationally important part of establishing your local prominence and is even recommended by Google. I cover citation building in more detail later on in this guide.

Review Count And Score

The number of reviews you have and your average rating score are factored into local search rankings. Reviews are also crucial for customers. In fact, 90% of people read online reviews before purchasing from a business.

Getting more reviews and more positive ratings will improve your business’s local ranking. This means that striving to get great Google reviews from your customers will actually help you get more customers. There are some great tools out there that can help you get more reviews, like this Google review link generator. Asking your customers to mention the products or services they got from you in their review will also help boost your rankings.

Information Consistency

A huge and often overlooked factor for local rankings is consistent information about your business across the web. While search engines are much better at determining this information these days, it’s still a best practice to keep it consistent. Ensure you use the same format for your name address and phone number.

Verified Social Media Profiles

Having verified social media profiles is another little-known factor for ranking locally. Google knows whether your social media listings are verified, they even filed a patent that detects if your followers are fake. A real business is more likely to have real social media followers. Google’s algorithms take your social media profile’s validity into consideration when determining your local prominence.

Your website’s authority and content

Google will crawl your website and use your authority as well as scan for keywords to help determine which results to show. Here’s an example:

An example of search results showing local map packs and "their website mentions" keyword results.

This is one of the top-ranking map pack results for the search term “Edmonton Disability Lawyer”. There is an extra line at the bottom that says “Their website mentions disability lawyers”. This is a prime example of content on a website being crawled and used to influence local search rankings. If you don’t have a page on your website that uses the keyword you want to rank for, you’re much less likely to get top three rankings.

 

Google crawls internal links to understand your website’s structure, and to gauge the importance of each page. Google will also look at the importance of pages that link to your location page. For example, your home page is the most important page on your website, so adding a link to your location pages from the home page will provide more value than linking to these pages from a blog post or a lower value page.

Example link structure of a website with a service area

Recommended places to add internal links to location pages:

  • Header menu navigation
  • Website Footer
  • The home page
  • About us page
  • Contact page
  • Service pages
  • Relevant blog posts

 

4. Build citations for every location

Citations are listings of your business on the web that include your name, address, and phone number. Citations don’t always provide a link to your website, but search engines still take these into consideration.

A study from Brightlocal, a leading local SEO software company, found that companies ranking #1 had an average of 86 citations, while companies ranking top 10 had an average of 75 citations. That’s a pretty small difference between ranking #1 and ranking top 10. I recommend aiming for 100 citations per location. If you have a lot of locations, start with the highest authority sources for citations (listed below). You can start with a few citations and work on it over time. Some is better than none.

The good news is that building citations is relatively easy. Just find a directory and fill out some information to add your business to it. The bad news is that it’s very time-consuming. On the bright side, there are lots of companies that offer citation building at relatively affordable rates. My personal favorite citation building company is Whitespark.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when building your own citations:

  • Ensure every name, address, and phone number matches your website and Google Business listing. You need 100% accuracy for citations to make a difference.
  • Don’t pay for individual listing sites because the best ones are free and your options are limitless.
  • Spend some extra effort trying to find business directories specific to your industry. Try searching Google for things like “Lawyer directory” or whatever industry you’re in.
  • Use a few different descriptions instead of copy/pasting the same one all over the place to get an extra SEO boost.
  • Use a spreadsheet to keep track of listings, their status, and the login info. Otherwise, when you need to change a listing you will have to try and reclaim it which is always a hassle.

Here are some great lists of local citation sites to get you started:

 

Also known as backlinks, these are links from other websites that link to your location pages. The best two types of links for local SEO are local links and industry links. Local links are links pointing from another website that is in your target city. Think local news sites, chamber of commerce, city reviews, etc. The second best is an industry-relevant link. So if you’re a lawyer, you would want links from relevant places like law blogs, business sites, and finance sites. Links that aren’t relevant like a lifestyle blog linking to a lawyer’s site will either provide very little value or no value at all. Acquiring links from an irrelevant or sketchy source can even hurt your rankings or get you penalized.

Getting these links is a challenge, especially if you have a lot of locations. But even a few links from other sites linking directly to your location page can be the difference between your page ranking top three or not at all. I do definitely recommend you try to get a few links for each location page. The key goal here is to try and get links pointing directly to your location pages, instead of your home page. If you can get a couple of decent links pointing directly to your location page, you’re going to shoot up in local search rankings.

Some tips for local link building:

  • Search Google for “target city + your industry” and look for search results that aren’t competitors. For example “Top 10 disability lawyers in Edmonton”. Try to get on these lists.
  • Get mentioned on local news sites. You can find example topics by searching Google for “site:domain.com +your industry”. For example, if you’re a disability lawyer and you want to get a link from CTV news, we would search for “site:ctvnews.ca +disability lawyer”, this will show you any posts on that site with that key phrase.
  • Join the local chamber of commerce, they often come with other perks like networking and speaking opportunities.
  • Submit your website to be added to “best companies in city” lists. These sites are often happy to add your business if you explain why you should be on the list.
  • For industry links, try searching for things like “top (your industry) blogs”. Browse the site to see if they take guest contributions that link out to other companies in your industry.
  • Don’t buy guest posts or pay to get your post on a site to avoid penalties.

Link building the right way can be difficult and time-consuming. When I start building links I like to go on a link-building spree where I dedicate a chunk of time towards getting a few initial links. I follow that up with monthly link building, where I try to acquire a few links each month as well as check to ensure my existing links are still there. SEMrush and Ahrefs both have great link-building tools to make the job easier.

 

6. Have a winning about us page

Google looks at your about us page to help determine your expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (EAT). Improving your about us page can lead to ranking improvements if you highlight key information about your business. A great about us page can also help improve conversion rates.

Here are some ideas for things to include to make your “About Us” page amazing:

  • What your company does
  • How long you’ve been in business
  • Your history
  • Locations you operate in
  • Industry affiliations and review websites you can be found on
  • Awards and certifications
  • Warranties, guarantees, and customer satisfaction information
  • Community engagement efforts like sponsorships and events you participate in
  • Events you have spoken at, tradeshows that you regularly attend
  • COVID-19 safety information
  • Mission, vision, values
  • Your team
  • links to case studies or before & after results
  • Add about page schema markup

 

7. Create city landing pages for nearby cities and secondary keywords

City landing pages are a lot like location pages, except you don’t need to have a physical location in the target city. A physical location in your target city is nice to have for city landing pages, but not necessary. A city landing page is primarily used for ranking your secondary keywords or ranking in nearby cities that you serve. This strategy is commonly used by local service businesses like plumbers and home contractors to improve their rankings in cities near them.

When to use a city landing page

Earlier in this guide, I mentioned that you want your main location pages to go for your main keywords. If you determine that you will need a separate page to rank for a different service. For example, you’re a disability lawyer but also want to rank for medical malpractice, making a city landing page for medical malpractice is the answer.

Example of a city landing page:

A nice example of a city landing page that doesn't have a location in that city but still ranks

Here’s an example of a nice city landing page. This is a lawyer with one office location in Calgary that is ranking #1 for the search term “Disability Lawyers Airdrie” which is a city just outside of Calgary.

Are city landing pages worth it?

The only downside to not having a physical location is it will be much more difficult to rank in the local map pack results because you won’t have a Google Business listing to associate with your landing page. You also won’t be able to build citations without a physical address. You can set your Google Business listing to a service area, but businesses that are actually located in your target city are much more likely to get the map pack results. This method still allows you to rank for Organic results (below ads and map pack) and will still help you get more traffic and leads from your target cities. You may be thinking of using a satellite office or registering a Google Business listing under a friend’s house address just for the SEO benefits. Satellite offices for Google Business listings aren’t recommended by Google and can actually hurt your rankings. Google has cracked down on fake Google Business listings lately. Some marketers have dealt with losing all their Google Business listings on their account just for using one fake or virtual office.

Optimizing city landing pages for local SEO rankings

Creating winning city landing pages is pretty much the same as creating a location page, except you won’t always have a physical location for these. You can reference my tips on location page optimization above, or check out my full guide where I cover everything on location page optimization more in-depth. The key thing to be aware of for these pages is to avoid creating duplicate and near-duplicate content. Google is more likely to ignore your page if you just copy/paste the content and change the words around a bit for each city. You’ll want to take the time to create unique content that speaks to your target keyword and target city. You should also aim to have no less than 1,500 words, pages with lots of useful content have been proven to receive higher rankings.

Other than duplicate content, the only big difference with local SEO landing pages is your internal linking strategy, which I cover below.

Getting city landing pages to rank with internal and external links

Create a Service Area page

A great way to build internal links to your city landing pages is to create a service area page that lists out all the cities you serve. Here’s an example:

This example mentions each city they will go to and links to location pages for each city. You can also add your service area page and your location pages to your main navigation menu and footer.

Get Local backlinks for your city pages

Local links and industry links are also ideal for your city landing pages. If you can get a few links pointing to them, you’re going to rank well. Some links are better than none. Even a few links can create a noticeable improvement in rankings. Check out my tips on link building earlier on this page, or read my full location page optimization guide for in-depth details.

 

8. Decide on your social media strategy for multiple locations

If you have separate social media profiles for all your different locations, you may be trying to decide if you should keep them or get rid of them and just stick with one social media profile for all locations. Businesses sometimes create separate social profiles for every location for the SEO boost, but it usually proves to be more of a hassle than a perk. Here’s how to decide if you should keep your multiple social profiles.

How to decide if you should have a social media profile for every location of your business

If your locations have a real human actively managing your social media at that location, you’re OK to keep the account going. If you’re just posting the same content on every location, you’re better off merging/removing all your excess profiles into one main profile. One good profile is going to provide better results than a bunch of thin profiles with 50 followers posting the same content at every location. Obviously having a real human posting unique and interesting content at every one of your locations is the best-case scenario, but this often doesn’t happen due to resourcing and staffing.

If you have a few locations where they want to manage their social but the rest of your locations don’t have a social media person, you can suggest that they send the posts to your main social media manager and have them post it. If you choose to have one main social account you will want to stick to your guns when people ask if they can make a location-specific social media page. Either everyone gets a page, or no one gets a page!

 

9. Decide on your SEO strategy for franchisees/branch managers that create their own website for their city

I’ve come across situations where a larger company has franchisees, branches, or chapters that go and create their own websites for their city. This is often a headache for SEO because search engines have major conflicts deciding whether they should show your main site or your individual city site. I’ve seen both instances, where the main site should be getting the traffic and the subsites should die, and I’ve also seen instances where the main site should lay off the local SEO and let the individual locations handle it.

Should you let each location have its own website?

Ultimately it comes down to business strategy. If you do decide to let individual locations build out their own sites, you should work together on a local SEO strategy. For example, your main site may not need local landing pages. Instead of pointing your Google Business listing to your main website, point it to your individual city site. Same with citations and local links point those to your individual city site. If you’re going this route, you can also link your locations on your main site to the individual city sites. You can also get your sub-sites to link back to the main site for the SEO benefits as they will be some of your strongest backlinks.

What not to do

The only thing you shouldn’t do is neglect your local SEO and have no SEO coordination with your sub-sites. Put some effort towards coming up with a clear multi-location SEO strategy. Sometimes it’s easier to just stick with one site, sometimes it’s better to have subsites for each location. If you decide to shut down your individual location sites, be sure to set proper 301 redirects for every page instead of just redirecting the whole domain to your home page.

 

Bonus: Tracking before & after results for Multi-Location SEO

If you launch a local SEO project, you’re going to want to track your results. Here’s some key info on how to do that and what to track.

Google Analytics

Track website visits and leads from your target locations. Track referral traffic and leads from your Google Business listings.

Google Business Insights

Track how many calls you get on Google Business listings. You can also track how many discovery search impressions you get, and how many direct search impressions you get. If “Get Directions” clicks are relevant to your business, you’ll find those in your Google Business insights too. I highly recommend using a tool that connects to Google’s API so you can pull and store historical data. I like to use Google Data Studio with a Supermetrics integration.

Rank tracking tools

You’ll want to track your local rankings to ensure you’re efforts are paying off. You’ll also want to keep an eye on competitors. I like SEMrush’s rank tracking tool. Ahrefs rank tracking is also fantastic. For local rankings, there are tools like Local Viking that can show you a geo-grid of what position your Google Business listings rank in every corner of your target cities.

Super secret bonus: Add review schema to your local pages by adding local business schema with aggregate ratings to get those little stars on your search results. This is the most secret of sauces. Your CTR and rankings will skyrocket if you do this properly.

Wrapping Up

In summary, if you want to get hundreds more calls and leads every month for all your locations, leverage multi-location local SEO. It’s well worth the effort. Try implementing some of these tips and see how much of a difference it can make. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. I love talking about SEO and will be happy to reply back to you.

Here’s a summarized checklist of all the things I recommended:

  • Have a dedicated and optimized location page for every location
  • Optimize your Google Business Listings
  • Build internal links to your location pages
  • Build citations for every location
  • Get local links for each location
  • Have a winning about us page
  • Create city landing pages for nearby cities and secondary keywords
  • Decide on your social media strategy for multiple locations
  • Decide on your SEO strategy for franchisees/branch managers that create their own website for their city